Will Backlinks Lose Their Prominence? – Answer by Google’s Matt Cutts

In 90’s Google entirely twirled up search engine market by making evaluations of websites beyond its content by its “backlinks”. The panda and penguin updates of Google emphasised importance of content. But the question that has become a matter of fact is “Will backlinks lose their importance?”

Head of Google’s search spam team, Matt Cutts, mentioned in his video that overtime back links will lose their importance though they are going to stay in Google’s ranking algorithm for many more years. The focus of Google these days in ranking a website on top of the searches is laid on determining if a website is able to meet the expectations of an expert user. The websites now have to be very informative to meet the information needs of an expert user. Nevertheless, backlinks also hold importance today as they can help in evaluating the reputation of a website.

Prior to Google, Linking was the sole way out to maintain a consistent visibility of a website. It was a good practice until it was natural. However, when it was found that behind internet spamming, back-linking was the prime reason, Google started taking backlinks out.

Considered from user view point, Matt Cutts said that they have realised that the users hardly pay any attention towards the backlinks from a site and are more conscientious towards the quality of content on the website they are going to visit. This clearly states that overtime backlinks will become less important.

The essential news is that one of the major areas in which Google is investing next few months is “conversational search” which is a sort of search wherein the machine will able to talk with you and have it understand you.” Google is trying to determine who wrote the particular article, and if the author is an expert of that particular field or not. This will determine the rankings of the websites and this is something where backlinks will become no more important in ranking content.

To understand the actual meaning of a piece of content, Google needs to understand the basic natural language of the writer as well as who wrote it, and then there will be less emphasis on backlinks. Nevertheless, Google is going to consider backlinks as well though for next few years only.

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